The Original Star Wars Finally Had Its Premiere in China

These days you don’t bother making a giant blockbuster unless you’re going to premiere it in China (Jurassic World made $100 million there last weekend alone). But nearly 40 years ago, when the original Star Wars changed everything in the United States, Chinese moviegoers were nowhere near that galaxy far, far away. Which is how this week, Star Wars: A New Hope finally had its Chinese premiere.

Even with Chinese appetites now primed for American blockbuster filmmaking, it wasn’t an across-the-board hit. “Although the character design is weak, the leading actress not beautiful, the leading actor not handsome, and the action parts like children fighting, placed in 1977, the visual effects are amazing,” said commenter Xiaosi Buxiang on the Web site Douban, via the AFP. At the same time, the AFP’s reporter noticed at least two attendees in Star Wars T-shirts at a sold-out screening on Tuesday—pirated copies of the original trilogy have been available in China for years.

The screening, part of the Shanghai International Film Festival, was a spectacle on the level of Comic Con or the Star Wars Celebration; the Star WarsWeibo account also posted pictures of Darth Vader and Stormtroopers streaming into the theater, plus a “telegram” from The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams that preceded the screening. Would an American blockbuster from the 70s without an expensive sequel opening this year receive the same treatment? Of course not. But why shouldn’t Shanghai geeks get to be part of the same marketing/spectacle orgy as the geeks in every other country? It’s our modern-day “We Are the World”: a special-edition Star Wars 64-oz. soda cup and a lightsaber in every hand.